Good Earnest People never see this side of things, because they are afflicted with narrowness of vision.  They admit no definition of doing good but their own.  They cannot see that the man who passes from a distinguished University career to a distinguished public life may do more for the poor by his pen, by his power of awakening sympathy, by the opportunity that may be his to obtain the reversal of unjust laws or the establishment of good laws, than he ever could have done by living in a slum as the friend and helper of a small group of needy men and women.  Decisive victories are won more often by lateral movements than by frontal attacks.  The wave of force which travels on a circle may arrive with more thrilling impact on a point of contact than that which travels on a horizontal line.  Society is best served after all by the fullest development of our best faculties; and whether we check this development from pious or selfish motives, the result is still the same; we have robbed society of its profit by us, which is the worst kind of evil which we can inflict on the community.

If this statement of social obligation is admitted as correct, most of my friend’s strictures on my conduct dissolve into mere harmless rhetoric.  For instance, he says I have ‘marooned’ myself, and goes on to draw a fancy picture of a South Sea Islander, content with laziness and sunshine, intimating that this is the kind of life which I have chosen.  On the contrary my life is what most city men would call a hard life.  I work hard every day, the only difference between my work and theirs being that my work is natural, wholesome, and pleasant, while theirs is drudgery.  In what am I more selfish than the average citizen, who after all is doing just what I am doing, viz. working for his living?  My friend would have me believe that the man who toils in cities does so from exalted motives.  He is bearing the weight of empire, assisting in the growth of British commerce, and generally serving the cause of national progress, while I sit in ignoble independence on my own potato patch.  I have known a good many men engaged in the lower ranks of commerce, but I have yet to meet one who is influenced in the least by these highly-coloured motives and ideals.  They are intent on earning their living, no more.  Their interest in commerce is precisely confined to what they can get out of it.  They bear just as little of the burden of the Empire as the tax-gatherer will permit them.  There is not one of them who would not object with vigour to take a single shilling less per week for the sake of progress, or any cause that might arrogate that title.  Besides, it is surely a piece of undiluted Cockney egoism to suppose that the only persons who do their duty by the Empire are Londoners.  We are still an agricultural country, and there are some millions of people who live upon the land.  They do some kind of work, which one may suppose is of some utility and value to the nation; why should their